How Do Search Engines Work?
Please keep in mind this is the highly simplified answer…Periodically search engines will send out an electronic signal called a spider. The spiders job is to surf the Internet and analyze links as well as additional information and send it back to the search engine database. It looks for relevant links, the incorporation of keywords in the text of a webpage, and site statistics, etc. The search engine then compiles the information the spider retrieves and indexes them by relevance.
Internet search engines are designed to help people find information stored on Web sites. They have three basic functions: 1. Search for keywords 2. Index the keywords and their locations 3. Allows users to find relevant information based on those keywords Major search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, will index millions of pages and respond to tens of millions of searches each day. To find this information, a search engine uses special software robots — commonly referred to as spiders — to build a “results” page based on those keywords. These spiders are constantly being updated to provide users with the most accurate results when conducting a search. At Submit Today, we strive to give you the best possible service by keeping current with the latest spidering criteria, which can change at a moment’s notice.
The search engines rely on three factors: • Crawling – search engines use automated systems called spiders or crawlers. The spiders index content, images text, links and meta data. • Index – information obtained by the spiders that are organized describing what information was taken from the pages visited. • Algorithm – a complex formula used by the search engines to determine the importance of each page.
Search engines do not really search the World Wide Web directly. Each one searches a database of web pages that it has harvested and cached. When you use a search engine, you are always searching a somewhat stale copy of the real web page. When you click on links provided in a search engine’s search results, you retrieve the current version of the page. Search engine databases are selected and built by computer robot programs called spiders. These “crawl” the web, finding pages for potential inclusion by following the links in the pages they already have in their database. They cannot use imagination or enter terms in search boxes that they find on the web. If a web page is never linked from any other page, search engine spiders cannot find it. The only way a brand new page can get into a search engine is for other pages to link to it, or for a human to submit its URL for inclusion. All major search engines offer ways to do this. After spiders find pages, they pass them on to another c
Search engines are basically computer algorithms which help users find the specific information they’re looking for. With literally trillions of pages of information online, without effective search engines, finding anything on the Internet would be almost impossible. Different search engines work in different specific ways, but they all utilize the same basic principles. The first thing search engines have to do in order to function is to make a local database of, basically, the Internet. Early search engines just indexed keywords and titles of pages, contemporary search engines index all of the text on every page, as well as a great deal of other data about that page’s relation to other pages, and in some cases all or a portion of the media available on the page as well. Search engines need to index all of this information so that they can run searches on it efficiently, rather than having to run around the Internet every time a search query is sent. Search engines create these datab
